WARREN ELLIS LTD

Recently—and, incidentally, in Lit Hub—I read a sentence that scared me more than anything I’ve ever read in a Stephen King story. In an interview, Courtney Maum, author of Before and After the Book Deal, mentioned how “as an almost a condition of getting a book deal, [it’s expected] you will become a one-person branding operation for your book, pulling a podcast out of your back pocket, a newsletter, [a] blue check verified social media accounts with gazillions of followers, a TikTok dance account, maybe a cooking show, the list goes on.”

Kind of a chilling opening for a piece about a lit mag called Taco Bell Quarterly.

But here’s the word of the day. I understand none of this but I love the word:

“Fluxonium qubits are more complex and less studied than transmons. The main advantage of fluxoniums is that they can be operated at a low frequency of about 600 MHz. We know that the lower the frequency, the longer the lifetime of qubits, which means that more operations can be performed with them. During the tests, it turned out that the dielectric losses of fluxonium qubits allow to keep the state of the superposition longer than that of transmons,” said Ilya Besedin, one of the authors of the study, an engineer of the scientific project at the NUST MISIS Superconducting Metamaterials laboratory.

“How can the entertainment industry attract new audiences?” An odd little article, this, that seems to describe where things are already going rather than offering new ideas. And it uses that terrible word “content.” This year I’ve seen audiences described as “content consumers,” which rather summons images of feeding troughs. I read a review of a film last night where it was described as “looking like content,” meaning it looked made for a streaming service rather than the cinema. A point is possibly approaching where the word “content” becomes a pejorative. It would be nice if the word, borrowed from the web to describe the material contained within HTML code, went away for a while.

When I got Meta’s new scientific AI system to generate well-written research papers on the benefits of committing suicide, practicing antisemitism, and eating crushed glass, I thought to myself: “this seems dangerous.” In fact, it seems like the kind of thing that the European Union’s AI Act was designed to prevent

Facebook Meta is a bad actor, part one million.

A new study has revealed the true shape of the diffuse cloud of stars surrounding the disk of our galaxy. For decades, astronomers have thought that this cloud of stars—called the stellar halo—was largely spherical, like a beach ball. Now a new model based on modern observations shows the stellar halo is oblong and tilted, much like a football that has just been kicked.

Anime NYC and Animé Los Angeles, two of the largest anime conventions in the U.S., have both announced that they will not accept AI art in the “artist alleys” where artists sell illustrations, paintings, and merchandise based on an artist’s original designs.

“Anime NYC does not allow AI generated art,” a representative of the convention wrote in an email to ARTnews. “Artists selected for Anime NYC this year were all curated by our veteran artist alley team, and it is a roster of over 300 artists from around the planet with diverse styles and artwork they create themselves.”